I am new to the forum and new to programming and java all together. Game development has always been a childhood dream of mine. I have been jumping around languages trying to find one that will fit me best for my endeavors, and have decided to finally go with java. I I wanted to share a resource that is good for any developer. I did a brief search on the forum and didn't really see it mentioned anywhere so I decided I would go ahead a share it.

I have found lots of good books on here covering pretty much everything you can think of.

This is my first post so ill give a little bit of introduction about myself and where I am at as a developer.

As a said earlier Game development has always been a dream of mine. I am 22 now and have been kinda directionless with my life up until the last couple years. I have decided I finally wanna go after that dream I had as a child. I was reading a book last night about living your dreams and I don't want to be that person latter in their life regretting not doing something they always wanted to do.

When I was younger I spend most my days making maps and skins for counter strike and counter strike source. I loved nothing more then seeing my thoughts come to life and become a virtual playground for others. I wanna get back to that point.

Now here is where I am at with my programming skills. I feel as if I have the basic grasp on programming I can look at some basic code and understand what is going on with the While loops, main game loops, functions, arrays but I lack the competence to put my thoughts into actions. I feel like i am right their on the edge where everything is about to start clicking into place. If anyone experienced this point of where I am what did you do to get yourself over the edge of following tutorials to writing some of or first programs and what where they?

I think it started to really 'click' for me was when I was reading a Java book from the library that had me making a simple calculator app with the AWT component subclasses etc, that's when I started to understand the Object-Oriented paradigm and the backbone concepts of programming. I recommend finding a simple task like a calculator app or similar, nothing major, and make it, following a tutorial if you need to. One of the biggest things I can say is don't try to jump off into the deep end right away, like full-fledged game development; instead start simple and try to understand what is making things happen, and then think about how to scale those concepts up to bigger things.

Newly joined up myself, although I've came by JGO many times on my hunt for info!

That said, I know that daunting feeling only too well when you are about to start tapping out your own stuff. ctomni231 put it in a nutshell there that you just need to start coding, something, anything! It doesn't matter that you will likely make mistakes, get confused, re-write and redo. That's where you really learn this stuff!

Thanks everyone for the response and welcome. I took everyone advice I went to the library yesterday the books on java they had were really out dated and I felt bored just looking at them lol. Thank god for the internet. Right now I feel like I have a hang of most the concepts so I am going to just start writing some simple programs today and learn as a I go.

First program I am going to write is the gold ol' ball in cup game where the user picks which cup has the ball in. I look forward to being part of this community thanks everyone for the warm welcome and words of encouragement.

More really basic ideas would be greatly appreciated just some simple console games. I wanna jump right into 2d but I know that's like jumping in the ocean before learning to swim.

Just wait, soon enough all you'll think about all day is how to fix bugs in your code or implement new features. It really is an awesome hobby, and it's helped me develop my math and problem solving skills way more than any other hobby could. Good luck on your adventure into the world of coding!

It is very normal, I read somewhere (new scientist?) about how having dealt with very structured problems (like coding) you might dream about their solutions. Happens to me anytime I spend more than 2 hours on coding during the day. It is really fun, sometimes I dream about restructuring my code entirely and wake up in the morning rushing to do that before I forget.

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